When comparing cmder vs mintty, the Slant community recommends cmder for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?”cmder is ranked 1st while mintty is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose cmder is:

Cmder builds on [ConEmu](https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5) console emulator, by adding enhancements from [clink](http://mridgers.github.io/clink/) (such as bash-style completion in cmd.exe and PowerTab in powershell.exe) and optionally extending it with [msysgit](http://msysgit.github.io), that brings Unix tools to Windows.

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Pros

Pro

Extends the powerful ConEmu

Cmder builds on ConEmu console emulator, by adding enhancements from clink (such as bash-style completion in cmd.exe and PowerTab in powershell.exe) and optionally extending it with msysgit, that brings Unix tools to Windows.

Pro

Minimal and portable version available

There is a portable version of cmder available which is just 10 MB in size. It can be put on an external device, like a USB stick, and run off it. There's no installation required.

Pro

Monokai color scheme

Cmder pretties up the default look of ConEmu using Monokai color scheme out of the box and allows flexible color and transparency schemes, including custom out-of-focus opacity.

Pro

File explorer integration

Cmder can be added to the right-click menu, allowing the user to start a terminal session from the selected directory with a "Cmder Here" command. The functionality can be enabled by opening up a terminal with administrator privileges, navigating to the Cmder folder and executing .\cmder.exe /REGISTER ALL.

Pro

Works nicely with command line applications

Such applications include CMD, Powershell, and MinTTY.

Pro

Has built-in Quake style drop-down mode

This is an extremely useful mode whereby the console hides and shows on ctrl+~ similarly to a gaming console.This feature is inherited from ConEmu.

Pro

Integrates with graphical applications

Portable GUI applications can be integrated directly into the interface of the terminal emulator.

For example, it's possible to integrate ST3 with cmder by moving the portable version of ST3 to /cmder/vendor/ and editing alias file in /cmder/config/aliases to include subl="%CMDER_ROOT%\vendor\Sublime Text 3\sublime_text.exe" $1 -new_console:s75V. Now writing subl in the command line will open ST3. The alias of subl can be changed to whatever's needed and similarly, the -new_console option's parameters can be changed to alter how the text editor integrates with the terminal emulator. It can be horizontal or vertical splits of varying sizes or tabs, etc.

Pro

Highly flexible

Integrates with:

cygwin

mintty

powershell

msysgit

Pro

Support for Cygwin and MSYS

Mintty is a native Windows wrapper around Cygwin but with added customization features like changing background color, font, transparency, etc.

Pro

Proper support for scrolling in terminal applications

The mouse wheel in mintty actually scrolls the content in man/less/vim, etc.

Pro

Xterm-compatible terminal emulation

Xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System.

Pro

UTF-8 support

UTF-8 allows for the encoding of all possible characters.

Pro

Drag and drop makes for ease of use

The drag and drop function in mintty allows the user to move an item quickly and easily.

Cons

Con

Issues with non-unicode characters

'ls' command can have issues with non-unicode characters such as cyrillic. As of 1.1.2, 'dir' can be used as a substitute that will properly display non-unicode characters. Unfortunately, it's an issue with msysgit that isn't being officially addressed (a workaround is available) thus no official ETA on the bugfix is available.

Con

Not as portable as advertised

Even though cmder is advertised as a "portable terminal emulator for Windows", it's not adequately minimalistic to be considered truly portable. In fact, one of the dependencies required to use it is the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015.

Con

very very slow

Con

Slower than ConEmu

Con

The portable (mini) version does not have UNIX commands

UNIX command support is only available for the full version.

Con

No multiple tab support

Con

No native support for WSL

Cygwin is dead. WSL is amazing, yet Mintty is designed around Cygwin and the WSLtty app to connect Mintty to WSL feels like a hack.